Wednesday, May 07, 2008 - Posts
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For whatever it’s worth, I shared Melinda’s sense that Bill had just sort of left his face in his other pants last night. (Now forcibly restraining myself from making the joke about where he might have left his other pants.)
Emily, you are right that the Clinton family tableaux at each of these speeches has proven a sort of still life in public social anguish—but given that it’s historically been the task of the presidential wife to look like a medicated groupie in a good suit, maybe it’s fair to say that Bill was doing a decent male impression of just that last night.
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Emily and Melinda: I thought the ruddy and spaced-out Bill looked like his heart was under strain last night for a different reason: because he was witnessing the first chapter of his wife's valedictory speech. The whole proceedings seemed logy, so fence-mending, so puzzlingly bile-free ... and then I realized, this was her way of saying goodbye. Granted, it'll be a long, Clinton-style leave-taking, with lots of popping back through the front door for wallet and keys and an extra hug and hey, just for old times' sake, can we talk one more time about seating those mathematically meaningless Florida and Michigan delegates? But really, isn't she just marking time so she can win Kentucky and West Virginia, let Obama reach an uncontestable majority of superdelegates, and leave the race on a less ignominious note (all the while, as Trailhead suggested last night, hoping against hope for a late-breaking video on YouTube to expose her opponent as a Boy Scout-molesting flag-burner)?
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Emily Y., I quite agree that we haven't seen the last of the rev.; he'll be with us through November and beyond. But in trying to prove that Obama couldn't stand up to the Attack Machine, Hillary put him through a pretty good simulation and wound up proving that he can so—because he just did. I didn't read Bill Clinton's body language quite the way you did; no question his wife's dramatic interpretation of gun-totin', hawg-sloppin', beer-drinkin' Amuricans was sub-par—but to me, 42 just seemed checked out. In fact, the red face, nobody's-home expression and mouth gaping open were kind of worrying.
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We surely haven't heard the last of the Rev. Wright problem, but after the Obama campaign has been focused on fighting off the notion that Obama is part of this country's deep racial divide, it did feel good to hear him talk again of it being time to transcend categories (though surely it was no coincidence that the backdrop of faces behind him were mostly white women, some old enough to be his mother). Speaking of his mother (I wasn't bothered, Emily, by his shorthand description of her), I couldn't help but think of the obituaries that appeared Tuesday of Mildred Loving, the black woman who was arrested with her white husband in Virginia for the crime of being married to each other. The Supreme Court finally struck down miscegenation laws in 1967; if Barack Obama's parents had traveled with him in Virginia when he was a baby, their mere existence as a family would have put them in legal jeopardy. And now a man who's the product of a marriage that would have been illegal in the majority of states is poised to be the Democratic nominee for president. I hope Mrs. Loving got satisfaction from this.
I also enjoyed watching the backdrop behind Hillary—the shifting facial expressions of Bill Clinton. I'm always intrigued by the semiotics of what she does with Bill. At the last few election nights she's had him in camera range as she spoke; whenever she has him close it seems to signal she feels she's in trouble. At first Bill watched her with that lip-biting look of enchantment we know so well, but as the speech wore on the mask seemed to drop and you could almost read his thoughts: "Hill, you haven't got it. I've got it, and you haven't, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. Hill, guess what, all those years you sacrificed for my career—well, it turns out I wasn't holding you back. You're only on this stage because of me, and even so, now that it's your turn and you had everything in your favor—Hill, you just haven't got it. And let's face it, Obama, he's got it."
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Nothing like a good welfare-mom-makes-good story, Emily; look what it did for J.K. Rowling. And though Obama's mom (and everybody else's, for that matter) was obviously so much more than that, this is just the kind of pithy, shorthand description that other Democratic candidates could never really manage, so I'm going to say I can live with it. For me, last night was like jumping into a turquoise infinity pool after a forced march across the desert with maybe a pack of javelina and a few locusts...OK, you get the drift. But isn't it funny how much smarter other people seem when they happen to agree with you? Last night's result suggested that even a 24/7 cable diet of Jeremiah Wright has not done Obama in. And that even a big, shiny gas tax holiday promised by a woman doing one weird Mammy imitation is too 90s for voters now. It suggests - I'm not saying proves, but leads me to hope - that we have learned something since those 1988 debates about the Pledge of Allegiance.
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I'm feeling better this morning: I agree with you, Dahlia, about the virtues of Obama's speech, and now that we've woken up to the slim margin of Clinton's victory in Indiana, the superdelegates should have an excuse to break for him and help Democrats bring this loooonnngg contest to a close. Which, for the good of the party and the nominee, they should start moving on. What's everyone else thinking about last night and where we are?
The line that jumped out at me in Obama's speech was this one: "This is the country that made it possible for my mother—a single parent who had to go on food stamps at one point—to send my sister and me to the best schools in the country on scholarships." The facts are true; the sentiment resonates. It's a good line for a candidate to utter when he's trying to shake the impression that he thinks about regular people as abstractions. And yet what an odd essence to reduce Obama's mother to. Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro was a college student in Honolulu when she married his father and had her son. She was in graduate school there—after marrying again and living in Indonesia—when he and his half-sister went to prep school on a scholarship. In this illuminating profile by Janny Scott, she never seems at the mercy of circumstance. She may not have had much money at various points of her life, but that seems like a chosen path, and a bit beside the point. Even in his hardscrabble food stamp moment, Barack Obama is entirely unordinary. He doesn't pretend otherwise, really, but it was odd to see his mother reduced to her one-sentence politically useful self.
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